Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is a biopic depicting the early career and rise of Donlad Trump and his friendship with Roy Cohn. Released a month before Trump’s third election, it feels destined to inflame expectations on both sides of the aisle.
The Apprentice starts in the ’70s with Trump (Sebastian Stan) going door to door to collect rent in his father’s slum. When he joins a club and meets the ruthless Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), they form a friendship that sees Trump learning everything he can from Cohn and climbing his way to tycoon status. It also charts the ups and downs of his relationships with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), his alcoholic brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and his steely father (Martin Donovan).
To expect a flattering portrayal of Donald Trump is perhaps too much, but The Apprentice is a surprisingly sympathetic affair despite some cheap shots and playing fast-and-loose with unflattering interpretations of events. The first half of the film is actually outright decent to him, showing him as someone seeking the fatherly approval he can’t get at home from the intimidating, underhanded Cohn. As his business takes off thanks to Cohn’s tactical cunning, he becomes increasingly egotistical and removed from any sense of personal decency.
Whatever misgivings you have about the truthfulness of the film, it’s impossible not to be wowed by Sebastian Stan’s performance. Not only does he look uncannily like Trump, he modulates his manners to gradually take Trump from his awkward youth to the blathering, gesticulating figure so frequently parodied now. If some of the slights against Trump feel cheap, Stan’s impersonation staying so far away from lazy caricature is almost miraculous. Jeremy Strong’s Cohn isn’t quite as masterful, but its intensity is magnetic, and he makes Trump’s horrified admiration of him seem plausible.
It’s uncertain if Abbasi means to shock us with some of the words coming out of the mouth of Cohn. Cohn’s worldview was what you might call Machiavellian realism, and the thing about Machiavellian realism is that without it you are at the mercy of any rival who embraces it. You can hate Trump and Cohn’s amoral division of the world into winners and losers, you can find it distasteful, but you can’t really argue with it at a factual level. Abbasi does show that Cohn seems to regret passing on his philosophical advantages to Trump as Trump’s character devolves, but then his earlier behaviour is at least as bad as Trump in terms of outright cruelty to his enemies. Abbasi certainly isn’t subtle with his thematic metaphors, showing Trump as Cohn’s monstrous creation in a scene depicting scalp surgery with over-obvious visual parallels to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster.
You don’t really get any major insights into Trump or Cohn, what you actually get is a less entertaining Wolf of Wall Street. It’s impossible to imagine anyone who hates Trump coming away from this film with a newly humanised approach to the guy, just as it’s impossible to imagine any of his fans taking the film’s ham-handed critiques to heart. It is nonetheless a good watch, but one that positively demands post-viewing research.
